NDP Leader Tom Mulcair scrums with the media in Ottawa last week.

“This is our moment to build the Canada of our dreams,” a beaming Tom Mulcair told a mob of hooting, hollering New Democrat MPs this week, as they returned to Parliament Hill, still riding the adrenalin rush of their victory over the governing Conservatives on Bill C-23, which they’d dubbed the “unfair elections act.”

Mulcair was hailed by his caucus as a conquering hero. And it would be difficult to argue, in fairness, that he doesn’t deserve at least some of the accolades for forcing amendments to C-23, which, though not perfection, vastly improve the bill. With a new CROP poll out Tuesday showing the NDP now lead the Liberals by a hair in Quebec, at 33-per-cent support compared with 32 per cent, Mulcair is having a good month. In the ROC another pair of new polls, by Angus Reid and Ipsos, show the NDP still running a distant third, but with Liberal support slipping — suggesting, possibly, that Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s yearlong honeymoon is waning. Indeed, this has the look of an opportunity for Mulcair — a moment in which he could bring all his dogged work in the Senate spending scandal to fruition, and establish his party as a government in waiting, as he has long claimed it was, to little avail.

But can the NDP leader capitalize on the opportunity?

There is no question but that, this spring, the strategic ground has shifted in a way that clears some paths for him that previously were muddy or obscured. The most important of these was the Quebec election. Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard’s majority victory, and the reasons for it — a powerful, popular renunciation of the very notion of resurrecting the separatist project — neutralized one of the most potent arguments against these New Democrats in the ROC, and indeed for many within Quebec. That is, that they would rewrite the federal Clarity Act to enshrine 50 per cent, plus one, as the threshold in a referendum that would initiate negotiations on separation. Of course, the NDP’s Sherbrooke Declaration remains a part of its platform; but the collapse of Quebec separatism makes it moot, the political equivalent of an appendix.

Next: The Supreme Court’s Senate ruling last Friday was, at first blush, nearly as much of a setback for Mulcair as it was for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Again at a stroke, the SCC gave the lie to any notion that the Senate can simply be made to vanish, as the NDP’s catchy slogan, “roll up the red carpet,” clearly implied. Mulcair has since insisted his party understood all along they’d need to secure provincial buy-in. But unanimous buy-in, as the court has ruled? It’s a practical impossibility.

But here too, the court’s very clear ruling arguably moves this entire field of political combat off centre of the board, at least for 2015 — in a sense levelling an area in which the Liberals, until now, have held a clear advantage. Trudeau’s disavowal of his party’s 32 senators last January was always intended to be a first step, to be followed eventually by deeper reforms in senators’ selection that would not require constitutional change. It is now unclear whether any reform at all in the selection process, beyond consultations of the most informal kind, would be legal without approval of at least seven provinces, constituting half the population.

Then, there’s the Keystone XL file, which Mulcair has consistently gotten wrong since he became NDP leader in March 2012. Again, somewhat paradoxically, he may benefit from developments beyond his sphere of influence; the pipeline is off the government’s agenda, at least until U.S. midterm elections are past and probably until Barack Obama is no longer president. As recent reporting by Bloomberg News has made clear, the lion’s share of blame for that rests with Obama and with Harper himself. But the shelving of the discussion effectively eclipses another area in which Mulcair had strategically hobbled himself, particularly in Ontario. The new thrust of the federal and Alberta government’s efforts, the Edmonton Journal reported Tuesday, is, guess what? Canadian pipeline projects, in other words an eastern-directed line, which the New Democrats have long advocated.

All of which leaves just one important battleground in which Mulcair clearly is still at a major strategic disadvantage to both the Trudeau Liberals and the Harper Conservatives — and that is his party’s chronic, historic woolliness on the economy, running the gamut from its dislike of nuclear power, to its attitude toward corporations (they’re evil, whereas small businesses are sainted) to its reflexive hostility to resource industries, especially the oilpatch.

New Democrats, quite suddenly, have an opportunity to demonstrate credible support for TransCanada Pipeline’s Energy East proposal, and for an industrial strategy that bolsters oilpatch-related industries in eastern Canada, and in the process win themselves some economic street cred. Will they step up?

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